Rodarte / Fall 2013 RTW

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Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s soulful and affecting Rodarte show was inspired by dreams of their California childhood. As Kate explained backstage, “We wanted to capture our memories of Santa Cruz: It’s a very personal collection.” The sisters played “with iconic imagery of the area, with things that had a visual impact,” like the beach and the boardwalk with its brightly colored amusement park rides, and the surfers’ suits, but filled the show with references that can only have personal meaning for the Mulleavys themselves, from their shared histories and collective memory. Who else is to know the memory thread that links nude pop socks printed with old-fashioned sailor’s tattoos with metal coronets or pins cast to mimic barbed wire? Only these two, in their quiet complicity.

The show opened with voluminous coats cut into the ambiguous, asymmetric shapes beloved of the eighties Japanese designers, worn with charmeuse blouses swathed like bulky neck-scarves, and culottes layered above leggings. (They reappeared at the end in light silks or canvas with a sponge-mark print.)

There was a sly hint of flesh when high-cut swimsuit bodies were worn with low-slung pants, or fluttering 1930s bias-cut dresses (like early Galliano pieces) veiled wave-embroidered tulle with spiraling bands of chiffon ruffles, suggesting perhaps the Mulleavys’ youthful fashion memories. Cabled op-art knits were bibbed with bright jewel shard embroidery and surfer’s scuba fabric carved into monkish asymmetric collars. If the assemblages were too esoteric for some, the collection was laced with unusually pragmatic pieces from these whimsical designers—a great overscale black leather biker jacket, for instance, or a boxy Crombie coat in face-powder pink, or a classic beige trench.

But the sisters saved the fireworks for the finale. Then, their models, with their poetic Botticelli hair, moved through a set composed of a forest of multicolored fluorescent lights, resembling a Dan Flavin installation (that evoked the Santa Cruz boardwalk’s brightly lit amusements in a contemporary way), wearing dresses that improbably combined sweeps of vibrant tie-dyed silk with gaudily jeweled lace, anchored with plastrons of bonded scuba. Assembled together for the finale they resembled a flock of beautiful New Age butterflies and signaled a new assurance for these inspired mavericks.